Henry Treffry Dunn, Dante Gabriel Rossetti; Theodore Watts-Dunton, 1882, Gouache and watercolor originally on paper, now on card, 21 3/8 x 32 1/4 in., London’s National Portrait Gallery Collection
This double portrait represents Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828 -1882), a significant painter and poet of the Victorian era, with his friend, the critic, novelist, and poet, Theodore Watts-Dunton (1832 -1914). Rossetti is depicted reading the proofs of his Ballads and Sonnets to Watts-Dunton. They are sitting together in the ground-floor drawing-room of the house they shared in Cheyne Walk, a room which was described by the artist Treffry Dunn as ‘One of the prettiest and most curiously furnished old-fashioned parlours that I had ever seen. Mirrors and looking-glasses of all shapes, sizes and design lined the walls. Whichever way I looked I saw myself gazing at myself. What space there was left was filled up with pictures, chiefly old and of an interesting character.’ The picture above Watts-Dunton’s head is Rossetti’s double portrait of his mother Lavinia and his sister, the poet Christina, which is also in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery.